Are Sean Penn and Madonna an Item Again After All These Years?

What’s old might be new again. Gossip outlets like E! and Page Six are floating the rumor that ex-spouses Madonna and Sean Penn are an item again, citing a recent event wherein Madonna said some loving words about the Oscar-winning actor (“I want to say, Sean, I love you, from the moment that I laid eyes on you”) and the two were seen with “their arms around each others’ shoulders.”

Page Six quotes some know-it-all as saying, “Everyone knows that Sean Penn is back with Madonna,” so I guess if this is the first you’re hearing of it, you’re no one. One odd bit of barely even circumstantial evidence that people are using to support the notion that the two, who were married for four years in the 1980s, are back together is that Madonna’s son Rocco Ritchie has been spending a lot more time in London with his father, director Guy Ritchie, of late, supposedly because he does not like Penn. Who knows what particular, idiosyncratic mechanics lie at the heart of that family dynamic, but, sure, it’s not all that hard to imagine being a 15-year-old boy and not liking Sean Penn, especially if Sean Penn used to be married to your mom.

Of course, there are stories from the murky past that are inevitably conjured up whenever Sean Penn and Madonna are mentioned in the same gossip items, stories that are currently the subject of a multi-million-dollar defamation lawsuit, in fact. The lawsuit, against writer-director Lee Daniels, has occasioned a revisiting of the complicated and contradictory reports of a vicious domestic-abuse incident in 1988, rumors of which have dogged Penn, and Madonna, ever since. In October of 2015, as part of Penn’s lawsuit, Madonna signed a statement in support of her ex-husband, averring that the decades-old claims that Penn tied her up and abused her are “outrageous, malicious, reckless, and false.”

The truth of that matter is not likely to be revealed anytime soon, if ever, so, for the time being, we know only that Penn and Madonna have been seen, and heard, being affectionate with one another, and that Madonna’s son has decamped to the U.K. to be with his dad. Of course, there could be many reasons why a 15-year-old kid would choose to do that—15-year-old kids are surly, fickle, impulsive—but right now, the prevailing rumor is that he wants to stay away from Penn. So, that’s what we’ll go with, for now.

How does that make us feel, the idea that, 28 years later, something like that could blossom again? If it was anyone else, it’d probably be nice, even sweet. But with these two? It feels like something else. Maybe we’re just so used to the two of them living such separate, distinctive lives—with different romances, in different cities, having different adventures interviewing fugitive drug kingpins—that it’s strange to consider them being a unit again. Of course, there’s every chance that they aren’t. But maybe, just maybe, something long lost in the fade of history has been re-discovered, for better or worse. And there just might be some strange comfort in that.